in the unlikely event that bin Laden surrendered,
Obama saw an opportunity to resurrect the idea of a criminal trial,
which Attorney General Eric Holder had planned for Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed. This time, the president tells Bowden, he was prepared to
bring bin Laden back and put him on trial in a federal court. “We worked
through the legal and political issues that would have been involved,
and Congress and the desire to send him to Guantánamo, and to not try
him, and Article III.” Obama continues: “I mean, we had worked through a
whole bunch of those scenarios. But, frankly, my belief was if we had
captured him, that I would be in a pretty strong position, politically,
here, to argue that displaying due process and rule of law would be our
best weapon against al-Qaeda, in preventing him from appearing as a
martyr.”

Obama's representations, given in an interview with Bowden, present an interesting - - - and perhaps unlikely - - - counterfactual. Over at Lawfare, Wells Bennett observes that "it seems a safe bet that congressional resistance to a civilian
prosecution would have been extreme, at least as heated as the
resistance to the civilian prosecution of the 9/11 co-conspirators."